by Ann Walmsley
“It’s about the siege of Leningrad and a general’s daughter is getting married and he needs a dozen eggs to bake the wedding cake,” said Graham.
“The general had arrested two people and so he sent them out on this mission to find the eggs,” continued Frank. “They get tied up with partisans and so they get into all these adventures until they find these eggs. I read it in one night. Or a day and a half.”
“That was a good book,” said Graham.
The men’s knowledge of World War II was impressive. Frank had a strong grasp of German discontent over the crippling economic effect of the Treaty of Versailles. Graham raised the point that Hitler could have wiped out the British Expeditionary Force early in the war, but he inexplicably halted the German troop advance at Dunkirk. And when Graham turned to the topic of American isolationism in the 1930s, he noted that the United States had observed the same ground rules as inmates in prison who want to stay safe. “If it don’t involve you, don’t get involved,” he said. “Stay out of it.”
By the end of the afternoon, Graham was yawning and Frank seemed to be developing a sniffle.We said goodbye and I walked out into the sharp cold, my boots squeaking on the packed snow.
Just seven days later I was back for the January book group meeting on Outliers. Graham was away on an approved UTA, so he couldn’t help lead the discussion. But Frank was more than prepared for it. He’d read it and two of Gladwell’s other bestsellers: The Tipping Point and Blink. Carol had introduced him to Gladwell’s earlier books back at Collins Bay.
When I walked into Beaver Creek for the meeting, I noticed one of Canada’s best-known white-collar criminals sitting in the reception area, conferring with a group of his visitors. His green designer pullover and snow-white New Balance running shoes struck me as out of place amidst the Cookie Monster T-shirts and baseball caps of some of the other inmates. But perhaps it helped him feel comfortable in his new surroundings and normalize his get-together with old friends or business associates.
I spent about half an hour with Frank before the meeting and he said the opening of Gladwell’s book had made him think about his own hometown in Italy. Gladwell talks about the Italian town of Roseto, whose residents immigrated en masse to Pennsylvania, where they proceeded to astound medical researchers with their low levels of heart disease. Frank was from another small town in Italy down near the toe of the boot: Vallelonga in Calabria. Like the Rosetans, his townsfolk favoured local produce, which Frank believes is essential to good health.Although he left there at age three and a half, he had a few memories of his hometown. “I remember we had a little square there and I remember wagons going up the street with horses pulling them,” he told me. “I remember an old lady poking a big key into my stomach and pretending to open my belly button.” Ninety percent of the town’s population emigrated from Italy to the Toronto area in the 1950s in search of economic opportunity, according to Frank, leaving their houses locked up and empty.
Frank had first heard about Roseto when he boxed with a guy from Pennsylvania. Frank was involved in boxing for a decade, from ages nine to nineteen. Since reading one of Gladwell’s other books, he had wondered whether boxing blows to his nose had impacted his brain, damaging his judgment faculty. “I’m thinking, gee, maybe that’s why I did what I did,” he told me. “I knew what I did was wrong, but I didn’t really have any control over it.”
Just before book club convened, I was startled to see Raymond, the white-collar criminal in the green pullover, ask Frank where the book club was meeting. “I invited him,” said Frank after Raymond left. “He’s written books. I told him he’d be an asset to the book club. And we can kick him out, just like anyone else.” Frank had just been telling me that there were so many lifers in the book club, it meant spots for newcomers would be slow to open up. Perhaps something had changed.
The thesis of Outliers is one that would be encouraging for any inmate. Gladwell argues that it isn’t just intelligence or innate talent that determines a person’s success. Rather, as Frank summarized in his journal, hard work and luck play an even greater role, provided, as Gladwell would have added, a person also has a natural aptitude. As inmates, they might be in jail now, but assuming some degree of talent and a willingness to work very hard, coupled with a bit of luck, they had a shot at success.
Two memorable findings in Gladwell’s book have become part of the modern zeitgeist. One addresses the role of luck or opportunity in determining which talented individuals get to be successful. Gladwell found research that shows that more top hockey players are born in the early months of the year. The reason is that those born soon after the January 1 cutoff date for eligibility in their age grouping are likely to be physically bigger than other players in the grouping who are born later the same year.That slight advantage, when kids start playing hockey at the age of five, leads to more coaching attention and more opportunities throughout their childhood and adolescence, which widens their advantage.
The other finding that has captured readers’ imaginations is that individuals who possess innate ability in a given field can achieve mastery in that endeavour if they devote about ten thousand hours to practice. Gladwell cites the example of the Beatles’ marathon gigs in Hamburg clubs from 1960 to 1962. The Fab Four played two hundred and seventy nights for up to eight hours a night, clocking more than two thousand hours toward their requisite ten. It occurred to me that any inmate with a five-year jail sentence automatically has ten thousand hours (at forty hours a week) to get good at something like yoga, writing or a foreign language. If he is also naturally gifted in that occupation, he could be a success.
We began the meeting by talking about the ten thousand hours. Tom, his long hair resting on the collar of his outdoor jacket, said that if he hadn’t had to divide his time between playing catch with his father and practicing the piano for his mother, he might have had ten thousand hours on the piano, which must have been his preference. Earl said ten thousand hours sounded about right to him to be an excellent hockey player. He was from Brantford, a noted hockey town. “When we grew up there, every ice surface was rented every hour of the day. There was pond hockey, river hockey, road hockey. There was parking lot hockey! You go out as soon as it’s light and you don’t come back until it’s dark again and when you take your skates off you can’t even feel your feet.” Brantford, of course, had produced Wayne Gretzky, known as “the Great One” in professional hockey.
Doc reminded the others that it wasn’t just the ten thousand hours and the talent, but also opportunity that determined success. “You got groomed along the way,” he said. “It was that stepping stone.”
But Bookman, the inmate librarian, wasn’t sure. He told a story about moving to Alberta as an adult and discovering that he had a gift for free climbing—rock climbing without ropes or other equipment. “I didn’t do it growing up,” he said. “I didn’t get groomed. I just decided to do it on my own. I was thinking I never really had any talent for anything but after six months I was doing just as good as the guys that did it quite regularly. Not to blow my own horn, but I was really good at climbing walls.” That news would not have thrilled the warden of a medium-security prison.
It was Dallas, the tall, dark-haired inmate, and probably one of the youngest men around the table, who brought the two ingredients of talent and hard work together in the most novel way. “There was something innate that made you want to put in the ten thousand hours,” he observed. I wish I’d thought of that. Perhaps passion, interest and drive were innate. It appeared to set everyone thinking. Could drive be considered a talent?
It wasn’t until about halfway into the meeting that Raymond spoke up. He hadn’t read the book because he’d just arrived at Beaver Creek, but he observed there wasn’t much consensus around the table about whether the book was good or bad. “It would be fascinating for me, given the socio-economic strata that is represented around the table and so forth, if you would rate the book on a one-to-ten scale and tell me whe
ther you agree with the quote on the front of the book,” he said. The blurb talked about the book being “explosively” entertaining, with “riveting” scientific information, and elements of self-help. The quote was attributed to Entertainment Weekly.
In one respect I had to hand it to him.The question evoked some of the most cogent assessments of the evening. As we went around the table, the book club members ranked Outliers at anywhere from three to eight, acknowledging that it was entertaining, though maybe not “explosively.” The ranking averaged out at about six. Frank was one of the ones who gave it a seven for its “rudimentary form of science,” but he argued that, like all of Gladwell’s books, it failed to provide a clear solution. Richard, who’d majored in sociology, was not impressed with Gladwell’s use of statistics and dubbed the author “the Michael Moore of the publishing industry.”
A few around the table ranked it highly, based on its self-help potential. And these were to me the most poignant moments of the evening. Bookman had shared the section on practical intelligence with someone on his range who had difficulty communicating effectively. He said that it prompted the other inmate to study how to change that aspect of himself. And Earl said with hopefulness: “You might not have that burning drive or personality, you might not be Stephen Hawking intelligent, but you might have other things going for you.”
Given the lukewarm ranking, Raymond asked how the book got to be a bestseller, or was everyone in the room crazy. Frank suggested that the reason for the book’s success went back to some of the lessons learned in Gladwell’s previous book The Tipping Point. Word of mouth. In particular, Frank likened it to The Tipping Point’s Hush Puppy anecdote, which described how a few cool young people in Manhattan in 1995 inadvertently started an epidemic desire for Hush Puppies, the previously uncool suede shoes with the crepe soles. Or, as Phoebe, the volunteer book club facilitator suggested, the book had likely caught on with young people because they were the right age to envision putting in ten thousand hours on something. On the other hand, Bookman joked, maybe it was just that everyone in the room was crazy, as Raymond had said. After all, he pointed out, everyone in the room was in jail.
The question of the role of nature and nurture in success cropped up over and over again. It was never more interesting than when Byrne mused about his own actions in life in the context of Gladwell’s chapter on feuds and their underlying “culture of honour,” tracking how cultural legacies are almost as powerful as genetic legacies and looking at criminal behaviour that results from those clannish behaviours. “Me being adopted, would I act like my genetic family in a situation of a culture of honour?” asked Byrne. “I don’t know.”
Byrne’s question was particularly germane given the high-profile honour killing case then before a Kingston court: the parents (and their son) in a family of Afghan immigrants living in Montreal were accused of killing their three teenage daughters for dating and refusing to wear traditional clothing. The accused were convicted later that month. And by coincidence, the book in the centre of the table for next month’s book club was Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel. It chronicled her early life in a nomadic Somali clan, and her political life in the Netherlands, where she became a target for Muslim extremists due to her opposition to the enforced submissiveness of Muslim women.
The men picked up their books and said goodbye, stopping to shake my hand or share a word. Tom looked at his copy of Infidel and said, “The fact that there’s a foreword by Christopher Hitchens raises the book in my estimation.”
And Frank asked me how Vince had reacted to his message, “The Beggar-master says hi.” “Did he think of me right away?” asked Frank.
“Yes, and he joked that you’re going to be his Beggar-master,” I said.
14
ISLAND LIFE
ACCORDING TO BEN AND GASTON, it wasn’t until sometime after the New Year that the Collins Bay guards identified the potential risk of the cayenne pepper in the inmates’ Christmas bags. The capsaicin in cayenne pepper is the raw form of the active agent in pepper spray. With a little alcohol and a few other easily obtained ingredients, the inmates might be able to manufacture an equivalent. Hell, they could just blow the powder into guards’ eyes. The guards themselves had only begun carrying pepper spray canisters for personal protection the previous year. Once the danger had been recognized, the institution went into an eight-day lockdown for a spice sweep.
All the prisoners who had bought the brick-red powder were asked to give it back. Some did, but—surprise—some did not. “Seeing like they put everyone on their guard,” said Ben, “everyone is either hidin’, stashin’, mixin’, puttin’ it away.” He himself did not hand back his two packs. The guards had to find his forty-five grams the hard way—by searching his cell. They fined him five dollars, nearly two days’ wages for an inmate with a prison job. Gaston said the guards searched with their helmet face shields down to protect their eyes.
The cayenne-pepper search impacted the Jamaican and other West Indian inmates disproportionately, because it was a key ingredient in their cooking. And I suppose that was a fitting atmosphere in which to read that month’s book club book, Small Island, Andrea Levy’s masterful novel about Jamaican immigrants in postwar Britain. Set in 1948 London, with all its deprivations, the novel examines how black Jamaican soldiers who fought for England as Commonwealth citizens find their “Mother Country” a less hospitable place after the war, when they return to live and work there. A white British couple, Queenie and Bernard, and a black Jamaican couple, Gilbert and Hortense, intersect in a boarding house in Earl’s Court, and subtle social frictions based on class and race ensue. All four protagonists take turns narrating, and the dialects and sentence structure are unique and fine-tuned to each character. Given that at least half of the men in the book club had roots in the Caribbean, I felt it was an obvious choice when I recommended it for their book list, even though it was long, at more than five hundred pages. I figured that the men would find lots of readers on the outside who had read it too, because of its acclaim. Small Island had won the 2004 Orange and Whitbread prizes as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
It was cold on book club day, but there was very little snow on the ground.As we struggled out of our winter coats, I noted how stylishly Carol and Derek were dressed. Carol had new oversized pink plastic-frame glasses and a cardigan with a massive faux fur collar. Derek was wearing a pair of purple-striped socks that added some zing to his preppy attire. I was wearing the same ensemble I always wore: beige pants, my green tweed jacket, fully buttoned, and no jewellery.
I brushed some lint off my trousers and decided that it was time to buy another “prison uniform.” That thought summoned a memory of the clothing I had been wearing the evening of the attack in London.When the trial was over, an officer from London’s Marylebone police station called to ask if I’d like to retrieve the clothing that they’d taken for fibre analysis. The items were sealed in a paper bag emblazoned in huge letters: POLICE EVIDENCE. I walked out onto Seymour Street with my bag, passing shoppers with their more fashionable bags from Selfridges, which was just two blocks away on Oxford Street. Sure, their clothing might have been new and chic, but mine had been combed for fibres and DNA. In any event, I never wore those items again. They are still sealed in that bag somewhere in my basement.
Carol had asked Derek to take the lead for the Small Island discussion. Another potential volunteer was visiting the book club that day to see if he might become involved. His name was Tristan and he was a retired art teacher and artist. “As some of you know, I can’t always be here,” explained Derek. “So if you want Tristan to come back …”The implication was that the book club members had better be civil to one another. Derek looked meaningfully at Dread. Dread had a habit of conducting side conversations or picking on Ben. The book club ambassadors had brought in several new members and Derek welcomed them warmly. There was Michael, a man with a slight lisp from Toronto’s South Asian community, and thr
ee white guys that Gaston and Peter had recruited: Colin, a young man from small-town Manitoba, Ford, a Maritimer with a completely bald head and Brad from Toronto, who gave off an air of cool. I wouldn’t normally have paid such attention to race, but the novel made us all aware of colour that day. Gaston caught my eye across the circle and waved. I waved and smiled at him and he smiled back. He looked different somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
“Okay, Small Island,” said Derek. “What did you think? Ben?”
“I’m of Jamaican background,” said Ben. “And I’m putting her up as one of my best authors.” He had vetted the book in advance for Carol and me, and Carol had given him a copy of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song to read as well. He thought Levy had perfectly captured what he called “that essence of Jamaica,” especially in The Long Song, which was set in his family’s home parish of Trelawny.
Javier, who was born in Jamaica, confirmed that the author had nailed the Jamaican patois, which he understood from his childhood in Montego Bay, when he’d been told stories about the mischievous Jamaican folk tale character known as Anancy, derived from Anansi the spider in African folk tales.
“Good book, obviously,” said Peter, the first white inmate to offer a comment. “But I knew that we were all going to end up talking about race. I wrote down a couple of things that the author said.” He read them aloud and both passages suggested that the British fought the war so that each could live with his own kind. “So it’s not about hatred,” concluded Peter. “It’s about differences. And I think calling it racism is just putting a face on it.”